Consumer Watchdog is a (fiercely) independent consumer rights and advocacy organisation campaigning on behalf of the consumers of Botswana, helping them to know their rights and to stand up against abuse. Contact us at watchdog@bes.bw, call us on +267 3904582 or find us on Facebook by searching for Consumer Watchdog Botswana. Everything we do for the consumers of Botswana has always been and always will be entirely free.

Obvious answer. To employ people and keep them out of trouble. Sometimes I think it’s like certain parts of the Public Service. I don’t mean here in Botswana of course, Oh No. I’m talking about other countries that think that the solution to economic woes is to employ thousands, if not tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people in made-up Government jobs.

Apparently some European governments are seriously considering spending what little money they have left inventing public service jobs to employ the unemployed. Instead of paying them a small amount of unemployment benefit to do nothing they plan to spend much more on each one doing nothing for a living. I really don’t understand the benefit. Every country in the world either knows already, or has learned the hard way, or is perhaps finally learning that the ONLY way to create a country populated by people with enough money to consume things is to keep out of their way as much as possible. Educate their kids, offer clean water, provide free basic health care, give them roads, police and military protection and then leave them alone.

You may now think that I’m going to say that we don’t need regulators, the law of the jungle should prevail, we should let nature take it’s course and that life would be wonderful. Clearly not. What I want is regulators that do something for their living, not just ones who sit there and play with their computers and themselves.

I’m a big fan of NBFIRA, the Non-Bank Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority. Almost since they started we’ve seen notices from NBFIRA in the papers warning consumers that they shouldn’t deal with a variety of companies. For instance late last year, after a lengthy legal battle, they suspended Omega Insurance Brokers for who knows what offences. However at least they got off their backsides and did what we taxpayers were paying them to do.

More recently the Botswana Training Authority, BOTA, withdrew it’s accreditation of the stupidly named “Botswana University College of Law School”. It wasn’t a University, a College or a Law School after all. This distinctly dubious organisation makes a series of unsupportable claims about the training they offer in law, appear to employ nobody with any credibility and have one rather suspicious Director. Even their online application form is stolen from the unbelievably-named “International Virtual University”, a diploma mill who claim to be in the UK but in fact are based in the British Virgin Islands, a renowned refuge for crooked companies.

Clearly this dodgy establishment have seen the writing on the wall because if you visit their web site they have recently posted a notice that says:

“We have suspended all our BOTA training programmes. We now render online library services for all members of the public.”

Roughly translated I think that should read: “Damn! We got caught.”

Amusingly they also say:

“Students owe us up to P70,000 in fees arrears. Please pay up arrears to our bank account avoid court action.”

Shame. Are you weeping in sympathy yet? Neither am I. If by any chance you were one of their victims, don’t pay them a thebe.

However, the bad news is that I can’t think of any other regulator that is actually doing anything really useful for you and me at the moment. That’s not good, is it?

Here’s a little bit of information about regulators. Some years ago the New Zealand Government took the radical decision to deregulate pretty much everything. One key thing they did was to abolish their Telecoms regulator. The effect? Nothing. Nobody noticed. New Zealanders could still watch TV, make phone calls and surf the web. Prices didn’t seem to go up or down noticeably and the quality of service actually seemed to improve slightly. Regulation wasn’t actually doing anything for New Zealanders so they did away with it. Why can’t we?

But here’s a nightmare situation. What would we feel if it turned out that a regulator got something badly wrong? Purely hypothetically, what would we think if BOTA withdrew registration from a legitimate training establishment run by decent, honourable trainers? How would we react if NBFIRA decided to mercilessly hound a broker who had done everything correctly and was perfectly financed and obeyed all the rules?

Heaven forbid that this would ever happen to, say, an organisation established to register and regulate the medical profession. How would we, the increasingly health-conscious public, react if they decided to pursue a vendetta against a hugely respected doctor who had brought skills, expertise and enormous experience to us in Botswana. What would we think of this regulator if they decided to ignore their previous findings about his (or indeed her) qualifications and then insulted him in public?

I think that in that, I stress again purely hypothetical situation, we would all be entitled to feel mightily pissed off. I think we would be within our rights to wonder what problem they had with him to justify a vendetta. Would we wonder if he had become too good at his job? Would we wonder if he had committed the dreadful crime of genuinely educating the public about health? Would we wonder if his crime was actually to save a few too many lives?

But that’s all hypothetical of course. That would never happen. Would it?

This week’s stars

Polelo from Barclays for handing in lost envelopes of money totalling thousands of Pula which had been set aside to be given to charities. Apparently “your honesty should be acknowledged from the rooftops”. Will this do?

Maria a trainee at KFC Game City Branch, Friday for being very friendly, was all smiles and thanked me for coming to buy at KFC and thanked me for the money I was spending!

Inspector Boiki Mojalemotho from Central Police Station but working at the Falcon Crest junction in the mornings for being the best traffic officer in Gaborone!

All of these celebrations were taken from the “Kudos in Gabz!” group on Facebook. Go there and register your celebrations!

Yet more scams this week, all of which have come in from Voice readers who have been alerted by previous warnings they’ve read here. Luckily they have all been suspicious enough not to part with any money but who knows how many other people are out there who haven’t been so skeptical.

Another job scam

I met a friend on the net and she told me she works for “Community Health Global Network” and she can help me to find work. But now I am a bit scared. Part of me tells me to try my luck and the other is saying No. Please, help! Maybe I am falling into a Job Offer Scam.

He sent us an email this “friend” had sent him:

“With Job Application reference number :01/CHGN-045/07562 and having received a forwarded confirmation mail from Becky Brown regarding your Application, and I do hope you are aware of the respective requirement. However you would receive our on-line Application Form to be printed filled and signed by you with a Passport photograph. In addition, single application and processing cost the sum of €250 Euro only. This keeps us within the requirements for the Federal Laws in the United Kingdom and avoids us being investigated for money laundering.”

It went on:

“Be inform that the organisation is responsible for your Non immigrants Visa, flight tickets, accommodation, and feeding during the six months training program there in the United Kingdom. Prospective Applicant going for the 6 months Job training receives a stipend of £1500GBP Monthly during their 6 months stay in UK the Job training and recruitment.”

OK, here goes. The first clue in all scams is the language. Almost all scammers have poor English. Then there are the practical and factual mistakes that people can be excused for not noticing. For instance there are no “Federal Laws” in the UK and the currency in the UK is the Pound, not the Euro.

Then there are some other common clues. The “Community Health Global Network” is a real organisation based in London so it’s strange that later in the email they give an address and phone number in Senegal, don’t you think? Particularly as the phone number doesn’t work. Yet again, these scammers use a free email address rather than one that seems to relate to the organisation they claim to represent.

Clearly this isn’t the first time this organisation has been used as a cover story for scammers. If you visit the Community Health Global Network web site there’s a big warning saying:

“Email scams. Please take care. If you receive suspicious mail – check with us first.”

Finally, there is the simple incredibility of the story. Legitimate organisations simply don’t operate by giving lots of money to total strangers they meet on the internet. Real recruitment companies don’t go around offering employment to people they haven’t met, interviewed or assessed. Real companies that hire people don’t demand cash up front, payable by Western Union (yes, it’s them again).

If you encounter any of these situations make sure you get in touch with us but, most importantly, don’t ever give such people your money. Ever.

Au pair scam

Last week we reported on a reader who had registered with an online au pair web site and had subsequently received an offer of a job looking after a child in the USA. All she had to do was pay $929 to a recruitment agency. We exposed how this was a scam.

Shortly afterwards she received an almost identical email from another scammer, this time claiming to be a doctor who again offered ridiculous amount of money, this time $2,500 every 2 weeks. Of course this was another scam but it raises questions about the web site she was using to get an au pair job. Be suspicious!

Traditional “419” scam

Just to show that the old scams are still there we heard from a reader who received this (spelling mistakes not corrected!):

“Dear Winner,
This is to Inform you that we have been waiting to hear from you in regards to the draft of £1,100, 000, 00 which you won from the United Kingdom Microsoft Million Online Award but you did not reply all our emails. Well we have deposited your Draft with HSBC BANK here in United Kingdom. Cantact MR.FRANK ADAMS below and provide him with this registration number PC0124475BN this Registration Number must be known by you alone for security reasons.
The registration number should be sent to:
MR.FRANK ADAMS< Tel: +44-703-174-6383 Fax: +44-7005-931-174 EMAIL:h.bank37@yahoo.com.hk”

All the same old clues are there that you can see for yourself. How many can you spot? Start with the spelling mistakes, bad grammar, free email addresses and cellphone numbers and the sheer silliness of the whole thing?

Money from Microsoft?

No, in case you’re wondering, the email you received (from a free Hotmail account) claiming to speak on behalf of “YAHOO AWARDS & WINDOWS LIVE.YAHOO/GMAIL” announcing that you have won £420,000, is not genuine. Sorry!

Friday, 23 April 2010

The trouble with believing things without evidence is that it becomes what they call “blind faith”. The problem with that is that it’s blind, it can’t see the real truth. Of course there are people who are naturally gullible, who believe every crackpot idea, every ludicrous notion, every stupid concept that is presented to them. There are people who enter the so-called Church of Scientology, for instance, just because they’re stupid. Then there’s the majority of Scientology victims who end up joining because what they see is superficially believable. When you hear about Scientology for the first time the basic notions are plausible. A former writer, naval officer and scientist developed a new series of theories about the human mind that helped people deal with mental health problems, improve their lives and helped them prosper. So far, so good.

However what the Scientologists don’t tell you is the truth. They hide the fact that their founder, L. Ron Hubbard, was a terrible author, was thrown out of the Navy after being court-martialled for gross incompetence, had no scientific qualifications at all, was a declared bankrupt with a criminal record and had a long history of profound mental health and drug problems. They also hide the real theories behind this pseudo-religion: that we are all haunted by the spirits of long dead aliens who were killed by the Galactic Emperor Xenu 35 million years ago. I’m not making this up, honestly.

They also hide the fact that Scientology is, at best a cult and at worst a lying, scheming, nasty, vicious, money-making scam that does it’s best to ruin those people who criticise them. Yes, me included, in my own little way.

My point is not about Scientology, it’s about not believing something just because it’s said, written, published or emailed. As consumers, as citizens and as human beings we must be more skeptical about what we’re told.

I had a good example a few weeks ago. I was one of many people who received a horrible email entitled “OMG-BLACK AFRICANS DON'T TRAVEL TO CHINA AND THAILAND AND BE CAREFUL WITH TAKE-AWAYS”. The email started:

“AWARENESS ALERT - this is SHOCKING! Pathetic and cruel!
I literally felt sick over and over again after reading but it is important to forward it. Please warn all family and friends about China and Thailand and how you order your take-aways. Please, please help, pass it on.
Sorry, but a few more hours before I can hold any food down, this is DISGUSTING!!! We have all been warned! Could this be someone we know? Gosh.”

There then followed some truly horrific photos of a real, dark-skinned human body being cut into pieces by a group of oriental-looking people followed by more pictures of a group of Orientals joyfully having a braai. The suggestion was clear: they had cut up the body of a dead African, cooked it and eaten it.

Before I go any further let me make this clear. This was a lie. An entirely false, untrue and horrible distortion. Someone who clearly had a problem with oriental people had constructed a shameful, despicable, racist lie, suggesting that Orientals eat black Africans. That was a lie.

I’m not an expert detective, just an enthusiastic amateur, but it took me less than 5 minutes to establish what the pictures really showed. It turns out that in Thailand there are cemeteries exclusively for bodies of unidentified deceased people and for various reasons these cemeteries fill up very quickly and then need to be cleared. This next bit is going to sound completely bizarre and possibly, to us, revolting. There’s a group of volunteers in Thailand who go to these cemeteries, exhume the bodies and then strip the flesh from the bones of the corpses. The flesh is cremated and the bones are then stored. This may seem totally strange to you and me but in Thailand, a predominantly Buddhist culture, this is actually a very respectful thing to do. That was what these gruesome pictures showed. The pictures of the braai were something else entirely and they certainly didn’t show anybody being eaten.

And the corpse being dismembered? He wasn’t African. I’ve spent time in the Far East and there are many people there who are surprisingly dark-skinned. He was one of them.

I think the point is that the first time you see this email and the pictures they contain you see something shocking, disgusting and alien. Our first reaction is going to be understandable horror. However what they show is something practical, respectful and even rather admirable.

It’s surely critically important that we look beyond our first reactions, be they positive or negative, to find the truth. When you first hear the apparently sensible ideas of the Scientologists you need to do a little research before you can establish that they’re a criminal cult. When you read an advertisement from a company like TVI Express claiming you can make a fortune without doing any real work, you need to dig further and realise they’re a pyramid scheme. When you see an advertisement from a furniture store advertising their crappy products on credit you need to do the maths and realise that their prices are actually Supremely expensive (and illegally advertised).

Please don’t believe anything you read without thinking critically about it. That goes for me as well. Please, I beg you, don’t believe anything I say either, do some research yourself and tell me if you agree or disagree with me.

We got an email last week from a reader who had registered with an online au pair agency. Shortly afterwards she received an email from someone claiming to be a journalist in the USA who needed an au pair to take care of her daughter. They email went like this (I haven’t changed or corrected a single character):

“I am Mercy Scolt living in United State of America (7652 CartillA Ave, Califonia). I am looking for an aupair to take care of my only Daughter Jenny. Jenny is 4 years old, intelligent and Smart. I will like to know if you are available to work as aupair/nanny with my family. I am a Jounalist and i travel alot due to my preffession and that is why i always hire aupair to take care of my child while i am not around. Your duty is just to take care of Jenny and make her happy always, you will take her to school every morning and also pick her from school after school hour. I need someone that can start working immediately, so i will like to know if you are available to start working immediately. Hence, get back to me with your bio data including pictures and other relevant details about yourself if you are interested in the job and i will also send you more details about my family and the job as soon as i hear from you. Here is my email: m_scolt@engineer.com.”

Suspicious yet? Look at the clues. She claims to be a journalist but can’t spell certain key words (“United State of America”, “Jounalist”, “preffession” and “Califonia”)?

If you do a little more research you can quite quickly establish that the address she gives in “Califonia” doesn’t exist. She also gave a phone number that doesn’t exist, her only means of communication seems to be her email address. Ask a Voice journalist if they can survive without working phones and they’ll just laugh at you.

Shortly afterwards she got another email, claiming to be from the agency she used to hire au pairs. Curiously for someone supposedly in the USA the agency had an email address in Turkey. Yet another clue.

Their email said:

“We have been informed by your host family regarding you travel arrangment and we are to get your papers ready soon as your host family informed us that you have to start working with her family soon. Hence, we require your maximum Co-operation to enable us complete your travel arrangement soon.”

They then requested a variety of personal details, copies of passports and school leaving certificates. And one final thing:

“Travel documents processing fee of $929”

Now I know you’re suspicious.

This is simply NOT how au pairs are recruited, it never has been, it never will be. Other than possible, very minor application fees, recruitment companies don’t charge the person they are recruiting, they charge the person or company who DOES the recruiting. If I’m trying to find an employee it’s ME that pays the recruitment company, not the applicants. That’s just how it works.

This is yet another “advance fee” scam. That $929 is what they’re looking for. Once you pay them that amount, and I BET they’ll need you to use Western Union to make the payment, that’s the common link with almost all scams we’ve ever encountered, you’ll probably never hear from them again. Unfortunately there have been cases where victims who have been scammed are then scammed yet again by the very same scammers. They realise that they have already found someone naïve and they continue to scam them for more and more money. Presumably the repeat victims are either startlingly gullible or they are desperately clinging to some hope that they’ll get their money back somehow.

One final clue. If you do a Google search for “Mercy Scolt” you get only 3 results (strange if she’s a journalist), two of which identify that name as being involved in 419 scams.

That’s our key recommendation whenever you receive an unsolicited email like this. Do some Google searching and see of the internet can help you. And of course you can always come to Consumer Watchdog as well!

Micro IT update

In December last year we reported on a consumer who bought a laptop from Micro IT. Very shortly after buying it he noticed a crack in the screen. Micro IT refused to repair it, claiming that the consumer himself must have broken it. When he insisted he hadn’t done this Micro IT said they would send it away for analysis. Later they told him that the report clearly proved that he had indeed caused the damage. Very strangely, Micro IT have refused to give the consumer a copy of this “evidence”. Do they have something to hide?

We suggested that the consumer write to Micro IT explaining that Section 15 (1) (b) of the Consumer Protection Regulations forbids a company from quoting "scientific or technical data in support of a claim unless the data can be readily substantiated". They MUST show him the report, assuming of course that it exists.

The latest update is that Micro IT don’t give a damn. They also say they don’t like the fact that he reported them to us and their awful service was covered in The Voice. That’s curious because they have a history of media coverage, most notably when they were prosecuted in February last year for software piracy. Surely they’re used to being in the papers by now?

Friday, 16 April 2010

Like many people I’m a sucker for a good detective story but I know I wouldn’t have made a very good cop. Something to do with being a bit lazy and not wanting to get killed in the line of duty.

Nevertheless much of what we do at Consumer Watchdog is amateur detective work. We spend a lot of time researching internet scams, fake educational establishments and pyramid schemes. The difference is that our lives aren’t in danger when we do it. Well, not that often. I don’t believe it was anything to be frightened of but I’ve had one death threat but that was only from a ludicrous “traditional healer” who phoned me to complain about my allegation that his business was illegal. The funniest thing is that having claimed in his advertisement to have psychic powers, he phoned me to ask where I was so he could come and straighten me out. He wasn’t happy when I suggested that, as someone with supernatural powers, he should be able to locate me quite easily with his magical powers.

Then there were the threats of legal action defamation we’ve had. Correction. Non-legal threats. Over the years we’ve been threatened by a number of companies who’ve not welcomed our exposure of their deceptive contracts, their illegal advertising and their scandalous finance charges. Of course not one of them has ever had a real case against us because we’ve never defamed anyone. As a result it’s never actually cost us a single thebe in lawyer’s fees. All we’ve needed to do is laugh at their threats and they’ve gone away, never to bother us again.

Anyway, the detective theme is just an excuse to be generous. This week I’m giving away some of my secrets, some of the tricks we use to catch the scammers. None of them are particularly exotic but they can all go a long way to help YOU identify scammers and fraudsters for yourselves.

The first and perhaps most useful is Google. Google seems to be the solution to many of life’s problems these days. If you can wade through the vast quantity of nonsense on the web you can find an astonishing amount of information. The trick with Google is to search carefully. For instance if you just search for the words Consumer Watchdog you’ll find around 2.5 million hits. However if you search for “Consumer Watchdog” (including the quotes) and the word Botswana you’ll find around 2,000 hits, many more of which relate to us.

Here’s a better example. Some months ago we exposed a recruitment scam calling itself “Dalberto Sponsors”. They offer to find you high-paid jobs around the world but in fact will just steal your money. If you are suspicious about a company like this, do a Google search for “Dalberto Sponsors” (including the quotes) and the word “scam”. That way you’ll find the truth about them rather than the lies they spread themselves.

However that’s old news. Despite traditional Google being very useful it’s the new Google facilities that are really powerful. Google Earth and Google Maps have allowed us to discover that the seemingly realistic addresses given by a variety of scammers and fake colleges were made up. They’ve enabled us to prove that even when the addresses are real places, they can’t possibly be the locations of legitimate companies.

On their web site Dalberto Sponsors give their address in London as “Unit 115 Lockwood House Kennington Park Lane Oval London SE11 5TD”. Go to Google Maps and try and find this address exactly as it’s written and you’ll come up with a blank. Adjust it slightly to just "Lockwood House SE11 5TD UK” and you’ll be more successful. A couple of clicks later and you can even see a photo of Lockwood House. Far from being a business address, it’s a residential apartment complex.

Still on Dalberto Sponsors (they’re a very good example) here’s another example of how the internet can help. They publish a page of the names and photos of their management team but don’t you think it’s odd that not one of these people has a Facebook page? Facebook claims to have over 400 million active users, you’d think that at least one of the popular and successful people Dalberto Sponsors claim to employ would have a page, don’t you?

Incidentally it turned out that all the pictures were fake, stolen from other places on the web. One even turned out to be the picture of a former mayor of Detroit who went to prison for corruption. The irony is overwhelming.

Wikipedia can be a good source of information although you need to be careful about how much trust you place in the information it holds. Wikipedia is true internet phenomenon: an online encyclopedia written entirely by people like you and me. Anyone can create or edit pages but you can often find this leads to slightly biased coverage of an issue. For instance if you read the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church with an uncritical eye you’d think the Inquisition and child abuse were non-events.

A friend of mine has invited me to participate in a certain website that offers to buy lottery tickets worldwide in national lotteries on your behalf, no matter your geographical location - www.thelotter.com

Tickets are paid for by credit cards. I'm not yet sure whether to take part or not. Please assist in affirming the legality/legitimacy of this organization. Besides does Botswana outlaw purchasing lotteries outside the country? I would like to know if it would be legal to transfer my winnings from outside to Botswana.

Thank you.

Firstly the technical issues. The tax situation. As far as I know you would be liable for tax if you imported any winnings as they would probably be considered "earnings". Bringing money into and out of Botswana is perfectly legal but evading tax is certainly not. However anyone considering moving this sort of money into or out of the country should consult a specialist first.

However, you should face the inevitable. There won't BE any winnings.

I had a look at thelotter.com and frankly I don't trust them. They may be a valid company but the nature of the services they offer is very dubious. They appear to be registered as a company in the UK but their credit card payments are processed in Cyprus which I find strange. Also, do you really trust a company of total strangers buy lottery tickets on your behalf? What guarantee do you have that they really will buy your tickets for you? What guarantee do you have that in the unlikely event that you win anything they’ll tell you rather than just keeping the money for themselves?

Then there is the basic fact about a lottery, indeed about all gambling. The odds are stacked against you. For every Pula you give a lottery, you will, on average, get back less than P1. In some national lotteries the “average return” is only around 50%. That means if you spend P10 you will, on average, probably only get back P5 in winnings. You are just throwing your money away.

Of course we’ve all heard of the lucky people who win a fortune but the probability that you will join this select group is microscopically poor. For instance, the chance of winning the jackpot in the UK lottery is approximately 1 in 14 million. To put this another way, if you bought a UK lottery ticket every week, you would probably win the jackpot once in the next quarter of a million years. Are you prepared to wait that long?

Lotteries are there to make money, whether for a private company or even a state lottery. They stress the jackpot winnings but very rarely actually disclose the average return. That's because the return is negative and they don't want you to know that.

Then there is the added issue of entering a lottery through a third party. If the margins are so small when you enter the lottery yourself they can only be much, MUCH slimmer if you do it through a third party who is taking some of your money. I checked the price of a UK lottery ticket and it is around P11. Buying this ticket through thelotter.com would cost you twice that price. Remember that you probably only get back half of what you invest in a lottery when you do it yourself so you’ll only get a quarter back if you do it through this company.

Remember though that this still assumes you’re going to win something. The chances of that happening are virtually zero. In summary, what thelotter.com are encouraging you to do is throw away three quarters of your money and wait over a hundred thousand years to win the big prize.

Finally, I wonder about the referral from your friend. This particular company rewards people for referring friends. It's not a real recommendation.

I really encourage you NOT to have anything to do with this company or indeed any other online lottery company.

Scams, scams, more scams

If you think you’ve been the victim of a scam please get in touch. We realise it’s embarrassing admitting if you’ve been a victim but if you spread the word you can prevent the same thing happening to your friends, family and neighbours. We promise you complete confidentiality.

So far several scam victims (or near victims) have come forward and told their stories. They all received an email from a total stranger with a bizarre offer to share their fortune. Sometimes it’s a legacy from a millionaire, other times from a corrupt government official, but they all say that if you can help them extract the money from their country they’ll offer you a cut.

Inevitably there comes a time, just before you are due to receive this fictitious money, when you are asked to pay a fee, perhaps a duty, a legal fee or a bribe to a government or bank official in order to get your hands on the cash. Once you’ve paid that money (which of course the scammers keep), they’ll either disappear or will sometimes even demand more and more money until they’ve emptied your wallet.

The good news is that so far everyone who has contacted us has eventually, and before they’ve paid anything, become suspicious and skeptical. Maybe we are a more skeptical nation than scammers realise?

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

There was an article in Monitor yesterday entitled "Monnakgosi becomes a Professor Of Divinity". This reported that:

"During a special ceremony at the church that he founded in the early 1990s, Omega Global University on Saturday conferred upon Dr David Monnakgosi a Professor of Divinity Degree for his lifelong service to God and the nation."

However there's a catch. Omega Global University doesn't actually exist. It's a fake university. As far as I can establish it operates from no more than a cellphone number. It used to have various web sites (including omegabibletheologicalcollege.com and omegaglobaluniversity.com) but those sites have both recently been suspended.

This seems to be the guy who answers the cellphone number and who described himself as "Professor Sibiya". No surprise, when you do some research you quickly find that there is no such person as "Professor Sibiya".

I'm not the first to spot them, you can see a story about another "honorary degree award" here.

Friday, 9 April 2010

A colleague of mine was flying to Johannesburg a couple of weeks ago. She got to the airport in Gaborone and was waiting for her flight. She waited a long time. OK, I understand, I think we all recognise that there are sometimes delays with flights, that’s just life. Like death and taxes, occasional flight delays are frustrating but inevitable.

However she was sitting there listening to a group of American tourists who were having a slightly worse time than she was. They’d just spent some time up in Maun presumably enjoying some of the best wilderness and wildlife activities the world has to offer and had left their lodge very early that morning to fly to Johannesburg and presumably then on back to the Home of the Free and Land of the Brave.

However their plans had all fallen apart. Just after their plane took off from Maun to Johannesburg it was announced that they would be making an unscheduled stop in Gaborone and then flying onto Joburg later. They were told that this was because of “operational issues”. It was there that my colleague found them, frustrated, irritated, angry and utterly, completely and 100% let down.

Luckily these tourists were sitting in the micro-lounge Air Botswana has at SSKIA where they could partake of the various delights it has to offer, namely peanuts and tea. When she found them there they had been stuck there for about 2 hours and they waited another 2 hours before they were able to continue their flight.

Did they get an apology? Did they get a free lunch? Did they get ANY lunch? Did they get a glass of wine or a free Air Botswana baseball cap in compensation? No, of course not. They were just left there to rot. When they finally left on the scheduled flight to Joburg from Gaborone (which was itself running late) all they were offered was some more peanuts.

Now I, just like you, firmly believe that all people are equal, we’re all the same under the skin and everybody deserves good treatment. However I am still enough of a capitalist pig to understand that certain customers pay good money for extra levels of service. They have actually handed over a wad of cash to be given priority, extra goodies and more than the usual level of service.

I also recognise that tourists are, in principle, no better than you and me but aren’t they the very people we are trying to seduce and woo and part from their cash? Aren’t they the people we should be extraordinarily solicitous towards? Aren’t they the people who, when their plane is delayed for no good reason, the airline sends someone from the vast workforce of Air Botswana over to Nandos in Phakalane for a take-away? Or if that’s too much bother can’t they be offered a free lunch from the restaurant at the airport?

Actually I think I know the reason why these dollar-wielding tourists were treated so shabbily. It’s because all Air Botswana can afford to give them is a packet of peanuts and a cup of tea. They haven’t got any money for anything else.

In 2007/8 Air Botswana was doing very well for a small airline. So well that it actually declared a surplus of P17.5 million. That’s a staggering achievement for an organisation that was losing money beforehand. So in 2008/9 you would hope to see that figure maintained? Well, perhaps not given the recession, rising fuel costs and taxes but nobody prepared us for the results announced in this year’s budget speech. Last year Air Botswana lost a truly enormous, staggering P87 million.

I really don’t know how an organisation can, in the space of just one year, drop over P100 million in profits. How can an organisation be so catastrophically useless?

Part of the answer is that I don’t think Air Botswana is actually an airline any more, it’s just a company that borrows aircraft from other companies. I haven’t flown very many times in the last year but every time I have it’s been on an ancient jet chartered from a South African company who cannot or will not pronounce Gaborone correctly. That can’t be cheap. What’s more if you believe reports in the press Air Botswana doesn’t have any managers left. Almost every senior manager position is either vacant or occupied by an acting-up junior manager. Where is the leadership? Where are the decision makers? Where are the Air Botswana planes? Where the hell is the money?

Air Botswana is the best example I can imagine of a national burden. It’s costing you and me vast quantities of money. Imagine every single person in the country (including children, the insane and convicted prisoners) getting a brand new P50 note out of their wallet or purse and burning it. That’s what Air Botswana costs every one of us.

This is the irony of so-called “public ownership”. We talk about Air Botswana being publicly owned but it’s not at all. It’s owned by the Government, it’s just the public that coughs up the cash to pay it’s debts. The sooner we rid ourselves of this massive financial burden the better. Let some capitalist speculator take it over and be done with it. I can think of better things to do with my P50.

At the moment all Air Botswana is doing is stealing our money and pissing off the tourists we so desperately want. If we’re really serious about tourism the best thing we can do is get rid of it before it ruins our tourist industry any further.

This week’s stars

Smolley Montwedi from Mascom who our reader says must be “employee of the month”.

I received an email from someone called Mestika saying they were from the Northern Ireland Institute of Business and Technology.

Some months ago I enquired with this establishment about a degree but they seemed too suspicious. Do you think they are real?

Absolutely not. They are completely fake. To begin with you can tell a lot from the email they sent you. It said:

“Dear Friend,
We are updating our record and found that you still have not yet enrolled for the Great British NIIBT degree programme. We will be removing and destroy your name from our record if we do not hear from you again.
Please keep us inform if you are organising the enrolment and payment for your degree programme with NIIBT the Great British.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.”

And this is meant to come from an educational establishment? As with almost all scams the quality of the English is terrible.

Like a lot of scams these days they have a web site but they really need to try harder if they want it to be convincing.

Various questions come to mind when you look at the web site. For instance, why do they call themselves the “Northern Ireland Institute of Business and Technology (British)” when their contact details are in Malaysia? Admittedly they DO give an address in Ireland but it’s in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland, not Northern Ireland, which is part of an entirely different country.

Like any educational establishment they list their senior academics but there you come across another problem. None of them actually exist. Not one of them seems ever to have published any academic works or to have been employed elsewhere. That’s because they are entirely fictional, like the qualifications this fraudulent bunch of scammers offer.

You might wonder whether this establishment has any official recognition or accreditation. Well, in fact it DOES. It is accredited by the so-called “International Accreditation and Recognition Council” or IARC. However the bad news is that this body, IARC, is itself a fake. This is a standard trick by non-accredited universities and colleges. Just buy accreditation from one of the many fake accreditation bodies. No standards are applied, no inspections are made, no checking is actually done. Alternatively what many of them do is just to register a web site and set up their own accreditation body.

If you approach this fake establishment (and I did) and ask them they’ll send you various very amateur documents about the qualifications they’ll sell you. The total cost for one of their fake Master of Business Administration degrees will be a mere £1,600, something around P18,000.

Of course you might think that paying that amount is worth it if you can’t be bothered to actually study for a qualification but the problem will be the criminal deception you commit if you ever suggest to an employer that this is a real qualification. I know of two fairly senior managers in large companies in Gaborone who have been immediately dismissed when it was discovered that they had lied about their qualifications.

Everyone who reads The Voice will know that anyone they meet who claims to have a qualification from the “Northern Ireland Institute of Business and Technology” is a liar.

Do you want to take that risk? It’s not worth it.

Fake qualifications email

Many people (including us) have received a spam email as follows:

“BECAUSE YOU DESERVE IT! Is your lack of a degree holding you back from career advancement? Are you having difficulty finding employment in your field of interest because you don’t have the paper to back it up – even though you are qualified? If you are looking for a fast and effective solution, we can help!”

In another email they sent, they said:

“Bacheelor, MasteerMBA, and Doctoraate diplomas available in the field of your choice that's right, you can even become a Doctor and receive all the benefits that comes with it!”

Obviously this is a scam, as well as being scandalous.

However there are two interesting things. Firstly when you call the USA phone number they give you are answered by an automated message that has a South African accent. Clearly our home-grown African scammers are travelling the world. Secondly, notice the spelling mistakes in the second email. “Bacheelor”, “Masteer” and “Doctoraate”. This time those mistakes are deliberate so they can slip past any filters your email system has in place to identify spam email. Never underestimate the intelligence of scammers.

UPS emails

Two weeks ago we alerted Voice listeners to an email claiming to be from Facebook that contained a virus. This week several people have alerted us to another email claiming to be from UPS, the international shipping company. The email says:

“Hello! We were not able to deliver your postal package which was sent on the 14th of January in time because the addressee's address is incorrect. Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our department.
United Parcel Service of America”

In fact there is no invoice attached, it’s a computer program that will damage your computer. If you get such an email please make sure you delete it without opening it.

Scam appeal

If you think you’ve been the victim of a scam please get in touch. We realise it’s embarrassing admitting if you’ve been a victim but if you spread the word you can prevent the same thing happening to your friends, family and neighbours. We promise you complete confidentiality.

Monday, 5 April 2010

Two weeks ago we alerted Voice listeners to an email claiming to be from Facebook that contained a virus. This week several people have alerted us to another email claiming to be from UPS, the international shipping company. The email says:

“Hello! We were not able to deliver your postal package which was sent on the 14th of January in time because the addressee's address is incorrect. Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our department.

United Parcel Service of America”

In fact there is no invoice attached, it’s a computer program that will damage your computer. If you get such an email please make sure you delete it without opening it.

A friend of mine has invited me to participate in a certain website that offers to buy lottery tickets worldwide in national lotteries on your behalf, no matter your geographical location - www.thelotter.com

Tickets are paid for by credit cards. I'm not yet sure whether to take part or not. Please assist in affirming the legality/legitimacy of this organization. Besides does Botswana outlaw purchasing lotteries outside the country? I would like to know if it would be legal to transfer my winnings from outside to Botswana.

Thank you.

Thanks for getting in touch.

Firstly the technical issues. The tax situation. As far as I know you would be liable for tax if you imported any winnings as they would probably be considered "earnings". Bringing money into and out of Botswana is perfectly legal but evading tax is certainly not.

However, you should face the inevitable. There won't BE any winnings.

Secondly the legitimacy of thelotter.com. I don't trust them. They may be a valid company but the nature of the services they offer is very dubious. They appear to be registered in the UK but their credit card payments are processed in Cyprus which I find strange. Also, do you really trust a company of total strangers buy lottery tickets on your behalf?

Then there is the basic fact about a lottery, indeed about all gambling. The odds are stacked against you. For every Pula you give a lottery, you will, on average, get back less than P1. Lotteries are there to make money, whether for a private company or even a state lottery. They stress the jackpot winnings but very rarely actually disclose the average return. That's because the return is negative and they don't want you to know that.

Then there is the added issue of entering a lottery through a third party. If the margins are so small when you enter the lottery yourself they can only be much, MUCH slimmer if you do it through a third party who is taking some of your money. I checked the price of a UK lottery ticket and it is around P11. Buying this ticket through thelotter.com would cost you twice that price. Your net average return, if you win anything, is going to be around half what a Brit would get, even more negligible.

Remember though that this assumes you win something. The chances of that happening are virtually zero.

Finally, I wonder about the referral from your friend. This particular company rewards people for referring friends. It's not a real recommendation.

I really encourage you NOT to have anything to do with this company or indeed any other online lottery company.

Thursday, 1 April 2010

I can hear a child asking it’s parent: “Daddy, where do scammers come from?” You can imagine the slightly embarrassed parent answering: “Well son, when a Mummy scammer and a Daddy scammer love each other very much…”

But where DO they come from? Is it a family business passed down from one generation to the next? Is it something that school kids in certain countries aspire to be? Some want to be a soldier, others a doctor or lawyer and a small group want to grow up to become scammers?

Presumably there’s money in it, otherwise there would be so many people doing all the scamming.

There IS, in fact money in it if our case this week is anything to go by.

A consumer contacted us saying that after visiting an African entrepreneurship forum on the internet he had been contacted by a company calling itself First Morgan Capital Group. They had invited him to apply for a major loan to fund his new business idea. Quite quickly they offered him the massive sum of over P2 million. He was delighted of course and was ready to accept when they dropped a slight bombshell. Before they could give him the money he needed to come up with a security guarantee of 7% of the loan value. They told him that this was just in case he defaulted on the loan repayments but they assured him that the sum would be safely looked after by a bank in Singapore.

Did I mention that at no stage in this process did these supposedly major investors actually meet their potential recipient face-to-face? Did I mention that all he had to do to get this loan was to send them a completed application form and a business plan?

However it was after that demand for 7% that he became suspicious. They were, after all, asking him for almost P150,000 of his own money before he could have the “investment”.

I assume that like him and me, you are now suspicious? You too can smell an “advance fee” fraud approaching?

It didn’t take long to confirm that this was a scam. Firstly there’s the First Morgan Capital web site which you should visit to see how professional these things can be. On the web site they give a profile of their supposed company and give addresses in both Switzerland and Peru. However it took me a matter of minutes to establish that their Swiss address was a fake. All the phone numbers they give are answered by an answering machine in English, which is strange as you would expect either German or Spanish, don’t you think?

The web site gives examples of recipients of their generous investments but, curiously, none of them actually seem to exist. Pretending to be rather gullible I then contacted the company and asked a few naïve questions. Who were their backers, what criteria do they use for selecting recipients and could they give me a named contact from a successful recipient please?

Within a few hours I got an email from someone calling himself “Kenneth Jones” who gave me a contact in Jamaica who he said ran a fleet of buses and who had been lent US$ 1.5 million. Isn’t it strange that neither the name nor the phone number actually exists?

Like the “traditional” 419 “advance fee” scams the scammers realise that almost everyone will realise it’s a scam sooner or later but they only have to catch a small number to make a very decent living. If they just get one or two people to call for this particular scam each month they could easily make a few million Pula a year. It’s almost tempting to start your own scam isn’t it? Well it is if you have no conscience, no morals and you are a thieving piece of excrement.

Luckily the potential victim who contacted us was skeptical enough to seek advice when they demanded all that cash. He’s been smart enough to avoid losing a small fortune.

I have been looking for a joint venture partner for a business project. A friend advised me to join a business networking portal called “Venture Capital and Equity for Africa”, which is a very good networking website for African entrepreneurs and investors.

In December last year I got a call from a company called First Morgan Capital Group and they explained that they can offer loan facilities through their private investors. In February I was informed they were offering me a loan of US$ 323,600 (just over P2 million). I was now looking forward to it as I have spent money and time for almost 6 months doing research on my proposed business project. They then told me that they needed a security deposit of 7% of the total loan value. However they told me that before I can receive the loan I have to deposit a 7% loan security into an offshore account based in Singapore. They are explaining that the deposit will be held by these offshore bank to protect the private investors and my company, and also the security can be used if there any loan repayment arrears, but it will be refunded (with 7% interest) after the loan has been paid fully.

So far everything looks legit, but I am very skeptical and am uncomfortable making a deposit into an offshore account but I desperately need the startup capital!

I am kindly asking on how best you and The Voice can assist on this matter in finding out if I am being scammed. I don’t want to lose my money through a scam and neither do I want lose these much needed capital-injection opportunity.

I think you’re very sensible to be skeptical. This is extremely suspicious. To be honest I don’t know anything about venture capital companies run their businesses but I bet it DOESN’T involve recipients being required to pay money to total strangers in foreign countries before they get to see the investment. I bet it also doesn’t involve the investor giving away enormous sums of money to total strangers that they’ve never actually met in the flesh.

First Morgan Capital has a very impressive looking web site but there are some fairly simple clues that they are less legitimate than their web site suggests. For instance why do they give an office address in Zurich, Switzerland that simply doesn’t exist? Why is the picture they use of their office in Lima, Peru taken from the Wikipedia page on Peru? Why are both their Swiss and Peruvian phone numbers answered by answering machines in English when in Zurich they speak mainly German and in Peru they speak Spanish?

On another page they give a list of companies to whom they claim to have lent money. However why don’t any of them actually exist?

Knowing by now that this was a scam I nevertheless emailed First Morgan Capital and asked them about how they work, who their backers are and asked whether they could give me examples of real companies in which they had invested. Quite rapidly I got an email from someone claiming to speak on their behalf but curiously using a free email account.

Unfortunately he wasn’t able to give me any useful information about the “company”. However he did give me the name of a company director in Jamaica he claims they lent money to. Curiously the Jamaican phone number he gave doesn’t exist. Neither does the company or it’s director.

Let’s face facts. “First Morgan Capital Group” is a work of fiction. They don’t really exist. This is yet another “advance fee” scam. All they want is that 7% “loan security” which in your case is an awful lot of money, almost US$ 23,000, nearly P150,000.

We later received further evidence that this was a scam when the consumer in question contacted us to say that First Morgan had again phoned him, claiming to be in Peru but from a phone number with a Hong Kong dialling code. The scammer claimed that he was working with a Canadian bank that would be the ones who would release the funds once he had paid them the loan security. Isn’t it curious that the contact at the Canadian bank doesn’t seem to exist either?

If you had actually given them the money it’s almost certain that you would never have heard from them again. However, what’s worse is there have been victims of scams who end up being double-scammed. They fall for it once and the scammers string them along and they end up paying more and more, in the forlorn hope that eventually they will get something back. This NEVER happens. The lesson from this is that old saying: “If you’re in a hole, stop digging”.

Fortunately the Voice reader who got in touch was sufficiently skeptical that he didn’t lose any money in this scam. He realised soon enough that it was unbelievable. However, how many less skeptical people have fallen for this and lost large amounts of money?

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